Mortgage rates are so low that it may seem like a great time to get a mortgage. For banks, however, it probably is the greatest time ever.

The profit margin on the rates that they can charge customers and the price they can earn for selling those mortgages to investors is at a record. This is measured as the “spread,” or difference, between mortgage securities yields and mortgage rates.

In the old days, there used to be a word for this kind of thing: price gouging.

And who is doing the gouging? Mainly, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase. In the third quarter, reported in the last several weeks, both banks earned robust profits from the mortgage business.

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William C. Dudley, vented this frustration in a recent speech, blaming the concentration of mortgage-making power at a few big banks.

Dudley is right. But what he didn’t say was that his own institution (the Fed), his former boss (Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner) and the Bush and Obama administrations delivered us this mess.

The broken mortgage market is the unintended consequence of the flawed banking bailout and the flaccid regulatory response in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

The government and the regulators have had two broad approaches to banking oversight during the crisis and its aftermath. First, regulators coddled the troubled big banks. The two weak behemoths, Citigroup and Bank of America, were granted time to work off their bad loans. Regulators practiced forbearance, overlooking the self-inflicted debacles — mostly housing-related — on their balance sheets.

Regulators encouraged the healthy giants to get even bigger by gobbling up the small and weak. So Wells Fargo bought Wachovia, and JPMorgan snapped up Washington Mutual.

Allowing takeovers without forcing weak competitors to get healthy quickly leads to an oligopoly. Exhibit A: Wells Fargo and JPMorgan dominate the mortgage business. They should face some competition. Instead, their biggest threats, Citigroup and Bank of America, are, astonishingly, pulling out.

The odd twist is that the Federal Reserve is a victim here, too. Despite its move to buy mortgage-backed securities in its latest round of extraordinary measures to lower interest rates, it can nudge them only so far because of the dysfunctional, noncompetitive market.

There has been plenty of talk about how the government saved the financial system after the crisis. And it did. Now the question is: Is this what we saved it for?

Three women have told the New York Times that music mogul Russell Simmons raped them, the latest in a cascade of serious allegations of sexual misconduct against powerful men in entertainment, media, politics and elsewhere.